Questions On
Doctrine

What Constitutes "Babylon"?

QUESTION 21

Do Seventh-day Adventists teach or believe, as
a body, that the members of the various Protestant denominations, as
well as the Catholic, Greek, and Russian Orthodox churches, are to be
identified with Babylon, the symbol of apostasy?

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We fully recognize the heartening fact that a host of
true followers of Christ are scattered all through the various churches of
Christendom, including the Roman Catholic communion. These God clearly
recognizes as His own. Such do not form a part of the "Babylon" portrayed
in the Apocalypse. The matter of loyalty or disloyalty to truth is, in the
ultimate, a question of personal relationship to God and the fundamental
principles of truth. What is denominated "Babylon," in Scripture,
obviously embraces those who have broken with the spirit and essence of
true Christianity, and have followed the way of apostasy. Such are under
the censure of Heaven.

1. Historical Background
Imperative.—In order to set forth what Seventh-day Adventists
believe on this point, it is essential first to get the background of
historical applications that reach back some eight hundred years. The
earliest application of the symbolic term

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"Babylon" to the Papacy, or the Roman Catholic Church,
appears in the writings of the twelfth-century Waldenses and Albigenses.
But along with their identification of the dominant ecclesiastical
apostasy of their day as the organization portrayed in the Bible
prophecies, they also stated that many of God's children were still in
papal Babylon. And these they were constrained to "call out," or urge to
separate, from her apostasies. A long list of spiritual-minded medieval
Catholics follow in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—including
pseudo-Joachim, Olivi, Eberhard, Wycliffe, Huss, and Savonarola—all boldly
asserting that "Babylon" represents the corrupted church of Rome, and
warning of her coming retribution. And for this some even went to the
stake.

2. Used by Protestant Founders.—During the
Protestant Reformation all leaders taught essentially the same, from
Luther, in 1520, onward. These men were scattered over Germany,
Switzerland, France, and England. In Britain were men like William
Tyndale, Bishops Ridley and Hooper, Archbishop Cranmer, Bishops Bale,
Jewell, and Coverdale, and John Knox and Lord Napier in Scotland. Ridley's
farewell letter before his martyrdom, in 1555, repeatedly referred to
"Babylon," and called for separation from Rome.

3. Continued
in Post-Reformation.—In post-Reformation times some thirty
prominent expositors maintained the same position, including such famous
men as King James I, Joseph Mede, Sir Isaac Newton, Bishop Thomas Newton,
Methodism's founder John Wesley, and Johann Bengel and various other
Continentals. Even in Colonial America, John Cotton,

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Roger Williams, Increase Mather, Samuel Hopkins, and more
than a score of others, down to President Timothy Dwight of Yale in 1812,
made similar applications. One was the noted Baptist historian Isaac
Backus, who in 1767 wrote: " 'She ['the church of Rome'] is the mother of
harlots, and all churches who go after any lovers but Christ, for a
temporal living, are guilty of playing the harlot.' " (See Prophetic
Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 3, p. 213.) Earlier, Roger Williams had
complained to the British Parliament about Protestants' clinging to the
spirit and doing the deeds of papal Babylon.

Meanwhile, several Old
World Protestant writers had noted that Babylon, the "mother" of
Revelation 17, had "daughters" that bore the same family name. And
believing that certain other Protestant bodies had retained some of the
characteristics and errors of the Papacy, they began to include them under
the family name "Babylon." Among these writers were such non-conformists
as Browne, Barrow, and John Milton.

4. Babylon, Mother and
Daughters.—In the early nineteenth-century Old World Advent
awakening, Lacunza, from within Catholicism, called Babylon "Rome on the
Tiber." And various Anglican and non-conformist leaders—such as
Cuninghame, Brown, M'Neile, and Ash—pressed the application. The
Protestant Association, organized in Exeter Hall in 1835—with such men as
Croly and Melvill—in 1839 sounded the "out of Babylon" call, including
both Protestantism and Popery.

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And the Dublin Christian Herald, edited by
Anglican Rector Edward N. Hoare, asserted in 1830 that the abominations of
papal Babylon, the mother, "covered all Christendom." Alexander Fraser, of
Scotland, and Anglican David Simpson, of England, held similar views.
Fraser said that all churches were tinged with the spirit of Babylon. And
Simpson declared that Protestant churches, of "whatever denomination,"
which partake of the same spirit and doctrines and circumstances, must be
considered daughters.

In North America, passing Elias Smith and
Lorenzo Dow, who wrote strongly on the Protestant daughters as related to
Rome, Disciples churchman Samuel M. McCorkle declared that Protestantism
had been befuddled by the wine of Babylon, and insisted that the "mother"
church had Protestant daughters. And prominent Baptist clergyman Isaac T.
Hinton (1799-1847) plainly hinted that nationally established Protestant
churches are, because of church-state union and compromise, daughters of
Babylon.

5. Employed in Advent Awakening.—Then,
during the Second Advent Movement in America in the 1830's and 1840's,
there was growing proscription among the larger Protestant bodies against
those who held premillennialist views, and increasing ecclesiastical
opposition to emphasis on the Second Advent—particularly among the
Methodists and Congregationalists of New England—forbidding the
dissemination of Adventism. This opposition led to the sounding of the
call to "come out" from the churches that rejected the Second Advent
message and that clung to the tainted doctrines of Babylon. That was how
the "call" came to be sounded at that time. It was not a condemnation of
the host of godly individuals in the various Protestant

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churches, but of the official attitudes and actions in
rejecting the vital Second Advent truth. (A historical record appears in
Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, vols. 1-4.)

6. A
Thousand Years of Precedent.—In the light of the historical record
of a thousand years, there is nothing new or strange about Adventist
employment of the term that had constantly been used by other bodies, as
they felt that light and truth had been rejected and opposed. And the
application of the term "daughters" of Babylon has similarly been used for
some three hundred years.

Groups and organizations such as the
Fundamentalists, the International Council of Christian Churches, and the
National Association of Evangelicals have withdrawn from the older
organizations because of what they believed to be modernist apostasy
entrenched in the controlling leadership of various
denominations.

7. Evidence of Departure.—Such are the
historic precedents. Adventists believe that the term "Babylon," referred
to in Revelation 17, has been rightly applied to the Papacy. Great
Babylon, however, according to verse 5, is mentioned as a "mother." So the
term "Babylon" rightly belongs to others also. We therefore believe that
wherever there are individuals, or groups of individuals, that hold to and
advocate the unchristian doctrines, practices, and procedures of the papal
church, such may justifiably be denominated "Babylon"—hence, part of the
great apostasy. Wherever such conditions obtain, Adventists, with others,
believe that the guilty organizations may rightly be denominated
"Babylon."

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8. Matter of Personal Relationship.—We
believe that conditions in the religious world will worsen, not improve,
as we approach the world's climax (1 Tim. 4:1, 2; 2 Tim. 3:1, 5). And the
gulf between apostasy and fidelity to truth will become wider and wider as
prophecy fulfills before our eyes. But our statements regarding Babylon do
not have the defamatory character that some would impute to us. They are
uttered in sorrow, not for invidious comparisons.

We are conscious
of the fact that membership in any church is not, in itself, evidence
either of fellowship with Christ or of fidelity to the fundamentals of the
gospel. As was the case of Israel of old, the Christian church throughout
the centuries has been plagued by the presence of a "mixed multitude" (Ex.
12:38; Num. 11:4; Neh. 13:3). And this is particularly true of these
latter times, when many have departed from the faith, as clearly foretold
in Bible prophecy (1 Tim. 4:1; 2 Tim. 4:3, 4). We firmly believe that God
is calling today for His children to break with everything that is alien
to the fundamental, apostolic principles of truth.